Pharaoh's+Challenge

The time is the 1st Intermediate Period of Egyptian History (2181-2125 B.C.E.). With the death of Pepi II, the last king of his dynasty and of the Old Kingdom, the central government of Egypt has collapsed. Failure of crops across Egypt due to climate change shortly after his death has caused famine and social upheaval. Kings from a previous dynasty based in Lower Egypt are attempting to take control of Upper Egypt and the Nile Delta region. The ruling powers in Upper Egypt raise their own armies in resistance. The ensuing power struggle is the setting for the game of Pharaoh's Challenge.

by Scott Crellin scott.crellin@cvesd.org

Instructional Objective / Learners & Context Materials / Object of the Game / Game Materials / Time Required / Rules / Design Process / References

=Instructional Objective= The instructional objective of this game is to teach and review concepts from the 6th grade California State Social Studies Standards dealing with Ancient Egypt. The standards addressed in this game include: Other Egypt standards are touched on in an incidental manner through question and fate cards, but are not developed conceptually.
 * 6.2 Students analyze the geographic, political, economic, religious, and social structures of the early civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Kush.
 * 1. Locate and describe the major river systems and discuss the physical settings that supported permanent settlement and early civilizations.
 * 2. Trace the development of agricultural techniques that permitted the production of economic surplus and the emergence of cities as centers of culture and power.
 * 3. Understand the relationship between religion and the social and political order in Egypt.
 * 5. Discuss the main features of Egyptian art and architecture.

There also happens to be a great deal of incidental mental math work involved as players navigate their turns. This is basic computation practice, and it is not of the sort listed in sixth grade standards, but it is math practice nonetheless.

=Learners & Context of Use=   This game is designed for 6th grade students (ages 11 to 12) in California schools that have had some prior exposure to Egyptian Civilization. The game could be played without previous knowledge of pharaohs, pyramids, the Nile, etc..., however, some context and background knowledge should enhance the enjoyability of the game. The intent is that the learners will visualize themselves as an Egyptian pharaoh engaged in a power struggle with rivals and focused on the goal of reaching the afterlife. For students who have studied Ancient Egypt, use of the Pharaoh's Challenge cards will also provide a review of a variety of facts relating to Egypt.

This game will work best if used in a home environment where the length of game play is not restrictive. A typical game at this point could take an hour or more, which is certainly a hindrance in the classroom. I am hoping that through modifications of the rules the time required for a complete game can be shortened. At this point, in order to use it in a classroom, a small group of students will need to have an opportunity to play where they won't be disturbed by the whole class and would also need a place to store the game to be continued over the course of 2 or more days. The game could be played more than once, however, any learning about Egypt will probably take place in the first playing with subsequent games being an exercise in improving or exploring different strategies for winning the game.

=Object of the Game= The time is the 1st Intermediate Period of Egyptian History (2181-2125 B.C.E.). With the death of Pepi II, the last king of his dynasty and of the Old Kingdom, the central government of Egypt has collapsed. Failure of crops across Egypt due to climate change shortly after his death has caused famine and social upheaval. Kings from a previous dynasty based in Lower Egypt are attempting to take control of Upper Egypt and the Nile Delta region. The ruling powers in Upper Egypt raise their own armies in resistance. The ensuing power struggle is the setting for the game of Pharaoh's Challenge.

The object of Pharaoh's challenge is to be the first pharaoh to build a pyramid and employ 3 priest units. A pharaoh who does so will be able to ascend to the afterlife upon his death. The first pharaoh to meet the requirements of reaching the afterlife is the winner of the game.

=Game Materials:=

The game materials include the following:

 * ====Game board====
 * Player pyramid and food card
 * Fate Cards
 * Pharaoh's Challenge Cards
 * 2 six-sided dice
 * 4 sets of player beads (containing translucent and opaque beads of the same color)
 * 1 set of food beads (containing translucent and opaque beads of the same color)
 * 1 set of black beads (used for pyramids, priest units, and enemy units)
 * 1 Nile-O-Meter marker
 * It is also a good idea to have scratch paper and a pencil on hand for help in calculations of resources and units.







=Time Required= A typical game will last approximately 1 to 1 1/2 hours with two players, but make take longer with 3 or 4 players.

=The Rules=

Set-up
====Each player selects a bag of colored beads to represent his/her units on the game board. Players will place 1 soldier bead (an opaque bead of their color), and 1 worker bead (a translucent bead of their color) on a pyramid space on the game board. Each player will take a game card on which to place their current food and pyramid beads. Each player also begins the game with 6 food beads (represented for all players by the orange beads). Pharaoh's Choice and Hemsut's Fate cards are placed on the marked spot on the game board. The palm tree token is placed on the first square of the Nile-O-Meter at the bottom of the game board. The diagonal brown lines in the square represent the planting season, the season at which game play begins.====

Taking a turn

 * 1) Each turn, a player is required to take 1 card. You may choose to take a Hemsut's Fate card which will have a random occurrence that could benefit of harm you. Your other choice is a Pharaoh's Challenge card. If you choose a Pharaoh's Challenge card, have another player draw the card and read it to you. If you answer the question on the card correctly, you are awarded your choice of 1 free farmer or 3 food beads. If you answer incorrectly there is no consequence.
 * 2) Your next job during your turn is to collect food that your farmers have grown.
 * 3) After collecting food, you may choose to buy new units using the food you now have. Place your new units on the pyramid hex.
 * 4) The next phase of your turn is movement. You may move any of your units or none at all. Combat may take place if your units encounter another player's during this part of your turn.
 * 5) The final phase of your turn is paying your units for their labors. Each unit you possess must be paid its particular wage.

Movement

 * During your movement phase, you may move as many units as you wish.
 * If you are moving a unit into an unoccupied hex, you are limited to moving only 1 space.
 * If you are moving in hexes that were occupied by your units in the last turn and are still occupied by them, you may move across as many hexes as you like. Upon reaching a hex that is not occupied, your unit must stop moving.
 * You may move across water spaces just as you do across any other spaces (the egyptians had boats!).
 * If you move a soldier unit into a hex that is occupied by another pharaoh's units, combat will occur. See the combat section.

Combat
You may move one or more soldiers into spaces occupied by another pharaoh's units.
 * If the space is occupied by a worker and no soldier is there to defend it, that worker unit is captured. Remove that player's bead, and add a new one of your own on your pyramid space.
 * If the space is occupied by 1 or more soldier units, each player must roll a die one time, adding 2 to the number rolled for each soldier involved in the combat. Compare the numbers, the player with the highest number wins the combat, destroying 1 unit of the opposing player. Ties are won by the defending player. Repeat the process until only one player has soldier beads left in the disputed hex.
 * If the space is occupied by a priest unit, that priest is captured and transferred to the winning player's pyramid space.
 * If at any time a pharaoh's soldiers occupy an undefended pyramid hex belonging to another player, the defenseless pharaoh is eliminated from the game. This may result in a player winning the game by default.

Nile-O-Meter[[image:Nile-o-meter.jpg align="left"]]
The Nile-O-Meter is located at the bottom of the game board, just under the title of the game. It is used to keep track of the current season of the Nile. At the beginning of the game, the Nile-O-Meter marker (a palm tree token) should be placed on the square containing diagonal brown lines. This space represents the planting season in Egypt. At the end of the last player's turn, the marker is moved to the middle space, representing the growing season. An entire round of play takes place during the growing season and when the last player has finished, the marker is moved to the flooding season space. During this season, workers are unable to work the fields and will instead build the Pharaoh's pyramid. For every 5 workers a player has on the game board, 1 black bead is added to a space on the pyramid on that player's game card.
 * Important note!** Prior to beginning the game, players need to agree on whether they will harvest food during the flood season. For advanced players, having no food harvested during flooding will add a layer of difficulty to the game. For beginning players, it is recommended that all players continue to collect food each turn regardless of the season. The assumption is that Egyptians maintained gardens near their homes independently of the fields in which they grew their crops, and would continue to grow food all year long.

Food Production

 * After choosing a card and following the instructions on it, it is time to collect the food your workers have produced.
 * For every worker that you have in play at the beginning of your turn (they were purchased last turn or before), you collect 3 food beads.
 * The food beads are orange, the translucent (clear) beads are worth 1 food, and the opaque (solid) beads are worth 5 food.
 * Oases and the Nile Delta were extremely valuable and fertile resources. For advanced play, you may choose to have workers in these hexes produce an additional unit of food. Workers in these spaces will provide you with 4 food beads per turn.

Cost of Units

 * **Name of Unit** || **Cost to Purchase** || **Cost of Keeping the Unit (per turn)** || **Unit Limit** ||
 * Worker || 2 food || 1 food || 15 ||
 * Soldier || 3 food || 2 food || 10 ||
 * Priest || 5 food || 3 food || 3 ||
 * At the beginning of your turn, you may choose to purchase any of the above units.
 * Purchase units **after** choosing a card and following the instructions on it **and** **after** collecting the food that your workers produced in your last turn. You cannot collect food with workers you have just purchased, only with workers that have been there for an entire turn.
 * You may purchase as many units as you wish at one time, but you are limited to having the amount listed in the table above in play at one time..
 * Worker beads are the translucent beads of your color, soldier beads are opaque beads of your color, and priest beads are black for everyone. Any enemy units placed on the board as a result of a Fate card will also be represented with a black bead.
 * Do not purchase more units than you can afford to keep at one time. At the end of your turn, you must pay the upkeep cost listed in the table above for each unit. For example, a player with 6 workers, 2 soldiers, and 1 priest beads in play will pay 12 food beads at the end of his turn.
 * If you have units that you cannot pay for, they abandon your kingdom at the end of your turn and are removed from play.

Winning the Game

 * There are two ways of winning the game.
 * Pharaohs were intent on reaching the afterlife, for they believed that they would join their gods and live on for eternity if they did so.
 * Therefore, the first way of winning is to complete construction of your pyramid and employing 3 priest units to mummify you upon your death.
 * You will construct your pyramid by placing black beads in each section of the front face of the pyramid on your game card. You receive 1 black bead at the end of your turn **during the flood season only** for each 5 workers you have in play.
 * Having a completely finished pyramid does not win you the game, **you must also have 3 priest units** in play to win the game!
 * The second way of winning the game is by combat. If you eliminate all of the other pharaohs by moving your soldier beads onto their pyramid hexes and defeating any units that are there, you are the winner of the game. Your pharaoh now can take all the time he needs to build a pyramid and employ priests without interference from other pesky rulers.

=Design Process=  My first thoughts in putting together a board game were on an entirely different topic, and when it turned out that my first concept had already been done, and done well, I decided to choose a different subject. I started by looking at the science and social studies standards for a topic that is of high interest to my sixth graders. I chose Egypt because it is a culture is well known. Most people have some basic knowledge about Egypt that they have picked up here and there- pyramids, pharaohs, deserts, and camels are some images that come to mind. It is also a topic that is quite deep, there are many facts and concepts to explore and develop there.

As a teacher some of the big ideas I like to make sure that students understand well are that the Nile is central to life (geography and economy), Pharaohs control every aspect of life (political and social order), and that pyramids and mummies are created because of beliefs in the afterlife (religion). I tried to tie all of these ideas into a game concept. I started with the concept that the player should take on the role of the Pharaoh. This seemed the best thing to do because the Pharaoh is in control of his kingdom and the player likewise needs to have control. Pharaohs in Egypt built pyramids as part of an effort to reach the afterlife; mummification was also a requirement. In order to do this Pharaohs need to exercise absolute control over their kingdom, grow a food surplus in order to employ various peoples, and protect their territory from invaders. The resulting of trying to integrate all of these ideas was the game you see before you.

In designing the model of a player 1st developing resources, then creating units of different types, then employing them to reach a goal, I have drawn on the experience of playing numerous computer games in which a player controls a civilization through various stages in order to eventually dominate the world. Examples of these types of games include the Civilization series, the original Warcraft and Warcraft II games (not at all like World of Warcraft), Star Wars Battlegrounds, Age of Empires, and many others (I may have spent a bit too much of my life on these types of games). The difficulty in using these games as a model is simplifying them to include just a few unit types and using only one type of resource as currency.

After my ideas began to take up too much space in my head, I began sketching them out on paper. I drew models of the game board, game cards, and jotted down question card ideas. I bounced ideas of my wife, who helped me develop the bead system for keeping track of units. This idea also came in part from watching the review of the Prophecy game on Scott's Games website. When I was happy with the look of the game, I drew a nice version of it on hex graph paper that I printed from a free graph paper website and promptly lost that game board. My second and final attempt was created in Photoshop and saved electronically. I used a few free clip art pages to get images for the game board, and my wife designed the Nile-O-Meter for me. I printed out the materials, bought some beads at a craft store and played a 1st draft of the game with my son. I was encouraged by the playing of the prototype because everything worked pretty much exactly as I had planned, with the exception that the game was quite long to play. I also noticed that it was quite easy to produce an immense amount of food. My son (7 years old) enjoyed it quite a bit despite his lack of Egypt knowledge and the fact that he needed help in making calculations of unit costs and food production. I have since tweaked the rules in an effort to reduce the game play time. I modified the cost of units to balance things out and try to reduce the amount of food that players would have on hand, making it more of a challenge to maintain an army of soldiers and a team of priests. I have yet to play test the current rules, play it with an adult, or with the intended audience. I think these are my next steps.

A lesson I will take to my next game will be to try to develop a less complicated game. This one took a long time to put together and is not a quick game to learn.

=References= http://www.printfreegraphpaper.com/ http://classroomclipart.com/ http://www.firaxis.com/games/game_detail.php?gameid=14 (A link to Firaxis games, the makers of Civilization) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warcraft_II:_Tides_of_Darkness (A wikipedia description of Warcraft II)